 Welcome back, everybody, to our closing session today with Rob Jenkins, Assistant Administrator to the Conflict Prevention and Stabilization Bureau. Welcome, Rob. Thanks, Liz. I want to say I don't really think he needs an introduction, but I'm going to give you a little bit about his background. He is a career member of the Senior Executive Service. He was previously the Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Dacha Bureau at USAID, the director of OTI at USAID. And in 1998, I didn't know this. You implemented emergency relief and recovery programs with World Vision. I don't know how I didn't know that. So your background is really extensive. But I want to say on a personal note, we've known each other almost two decades. We started, we were working at USAID together. I was in a competing office at the time. I was at CMM, and you were at OTI. Competition's good. Yeah, no. But we always collaborated. Well, it was kind of like the competition was outside trying to pit us together. But what I want to say on a personal note is that Rob, we've been joking about it a little bit. But you take risks. You make mistakes. You're honest. You are so passionate about this work. I've seen it so many times. And I can't think of a better person to push this field forward. I know you were a main architect of this bureau. This bureau, it's so key for peacebuilding. And I want to thank you. But I also hope that you do address that. How can you be a risk taker and be principled and straightforward and speak truth to power and actually get promoted? I think that's something I really want folks to really think about and hear from you today. But on that note, you're going to give a few remarks. And then, Lisa's back. We're going to have a conversation, some questions we have. And I know there's a lot of questions out there that people want to discuss. So I'm going to hand it off to you and say thank you. Well, thank you, Liz. And when you say I'm passionate, that means I cry a lot. So I'll try not to cry, but you already sort of got me tearing up already. So I am really, really excited to be here. It's an honor. Anyone, all of you who care about peacebuilding, to be able to sit on a stage with my friend Liz Hume from the Alliance for Peacebuilding, my friend, Liz Grande from this wonderful place, USIP, next year you should probably have a raffle and raise money for who gets to spend time with the two of you answering questions. So if I don't get to your comments or what you want me to talk about, just throw it to me in the question. So whoever made the decision to put Rob Jenkins with a microphone to talk about the Bureau for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization and the Global Fragility Act should have thought twice, because I can talk for about 17 days on these issues. And they are things I'm very excited about. So I do want to talk a little bit about the CPS Bureau. Talk about the Global Fragility Act, something that's talked a lot but not very well understood, I think, and then maybe a little bit about what we think we're going to do to implement this and make it work. So my Bureau is responsible as it's titled for Conflict Prevention and Stabilization. We also are supposed to be working on violence prevention, atrocity prevention, country and violent extremism, women, peace, security. There's a lot of stuff. We have no new people and no new money. We're supposed to change the world. But that's what we did for a living, right? So we're going to get going. All of those things, oh, in peace building, all of those things were things that USAID had done in the past. But it was a little bit here, a little bit there. And it was buried. Much of it was buried within the bureaucracy. You mentioned the affectionately known dacha bureau. Democracy, conflict, and humanitarian assistance. Those are very diverse things. There was a few other things. There was other things. And anytime you put something in with humanitarian assistance, which is now anywhere from a quarter to almost a third, I think, of the USAID budget, all those other things are pushed aside. I know because I had the honor for almost a year of leading dacha. And when you're dealing with billions of dollars making decisions on the number one, number two issues on the front page every day, something like prevention, peace building, that little stuff gets pushed aside. So by creating this bureau, just taking it apart from humanitarian assistance, you are elevating it. My boss is Samantha Power, the administrator, and Isabel Coleman, her deputy. I am not buried in the bureaucracy anymore. So we now have an opportunity to do what we've tried to do for a long time, which is get out ahead of these crises and prevent. We have the Office of Transition Initiatives, OTI. It's almost 30 years old now. It's in 16 countries right now. It spends about $250 million a year. A lot of that is passing the cup around parts of the government. It only gets about $92 million a year. But we have 30 years almost of lessons learned. We've made mistakes. We've taken risks. We've seen what works. We've seen what doesn't. We know what can be ramped up. What shouldn't be ramped up. Now we also have our Office of Conflict and Violence Prevention, CVP. That was created out of the office you used to work for, CMM, Conflict Management and Medigation. We're good at coming up with new names in the government. What we're trying to do with this office, which is CMM was never resourced to meet its mission. We are trying now to create a cadre of experts and more budget so that every USAID mission in the world, because 75%, 70% of missions in the world, we have over 80 missions in the world, are affected by conflict in one way or the other. That is the state of the world today. It is not the 1980s. It is not the 1990s that we were all designed for. This new bureau and this office saying that we need to try to support every mission in the world on conflict sensitivity, that is what we're supposed to be doing. And then we have our Office of Civilian Military Cooperation, CMC, which existed before. I know particularly with this community, not everyone is completely excited or understands the need for a full-time office within USAID whose number one only job is to build, foster, and strengthen the relationship with the Department of Defense and the United States Military. But if we want, as peace builders, as development professionals, to be at the table where we are now with the National Security Council, with Samantha Power becoming the administrative USAID, President Biden elevated USAID to the National Security Council, if we're going to be wanting to and we are influencing our defense and diplomatic colleagues, that we better understand them. We better know what part of the Pentagon or who the J2 or the J5 at Indo-Paycom do you go to with that message. And we have that. And I've seen it working, Samantha Power, military commanders of extremely high rank up to the Secretary of Defense in conversation, development, and peace building is now part of that conversation. So we're not, this isn't the first time, however, that USAID has tried to get into the prevention space. A few months ago, I was looking at comments, I was preparing comments for another talk. And I found in my drawer physically, a speech from the administrator Brian Atwood in 1998 that I could probably read right now, talking about what they were saying then in the Clinton administration, that we need to get out in front of these problems. And we didn't do it then. The bureaucracy, how we need to take risks, bureaucracy doesn't do that. We need to get policy makers to focus on prevention. Everyone says that's a great idea, but then they get right back to today's crisis, tomorrow's crisis. That is our challenge. That's gonna be really, really hard. Archbishop Tutu used to like to say you can save someone who's drowning in the river and then you can save another one. At some point you should go up the river and find out why they've fallen in and solve that problem. We need to do that in a lot of these places and we can do that, we just need to focus on it. And then if there's a crisis, we need to be more nimble, more agile, more flexible. We need to accelerate the decision cycles that we're in. We try so hard to analyze things and we're so afraid of making a problem and taking a risk of any sort. We have this paralysis of analysis by the time we decide to do something, it's too late. The problem has changed and we have to go back into analyzing it again. My friend and mentor Rick Barton, Ambassador Rick Barton, when he directed OTI, I'm old, this is back in the 90s, he used to drill into our head, it's better to be 80% right at the right time than 100% right too late. True. And that is so true and yet it's hard to put into action. So this is what we're trying to do with this new bureau. Luckily we have the Global Fragility Act. Global Fragility Act passed in 2019, broad, multi, everybody was in for it in Congress, thanks to people that worked very hard to make it happen. Then at the end of 2020, US government published the US government strategy for preventing conflict and promoting stability. I had hoped today to be able to talk about our five or more focused countries and regions that are the priority countries where we're gonna come up with by law, 10 year strategies, prioritize these places and get it right. Using all of the lessons we've learned, hard fought lessons in Iraq, Afghanistan, other places, that's what the law calls us to do. It calls us to work in country as a true country team to evaluate a problem away from the earmarks and away from the restrictions that we're dealing with. And it also mandates us, I love this part, it doesn't ask, it mandates us by law to go to Congress and say, here are the things we've identified to get in our way. Here are the US, this is where the US government is not getting it right. Help give us relief on this in X and Y and I'm enough of a geek of a bureaucrat that that for me is really, really exciting. And then use that, and the reason we haven't come up with the priority countries yet, is we, one, we wanna get it right, but two, it's really hard. The United States government does not like to prioritize and say these five countries are more important for any one reason than those, because you just upset people who either work on or live in those countries. The law had to be passed to mandate us and force us to come up with these priorities and we'll have those soon and we'll get to work. One of the things we need to do in that process of identifying the problems is our administrator, Samantha Power, likes to talk about the sludge in the system. All those things that slow us down, all those things that keep us from loving our jobs, all those things that prevent us from doing the right thing. Global Fragility Act gives us a legal hammer to go in and break some of that glass and say get out of the way, we know we can do something better, we need to do it. Now back in November at Georgetown University, same place that Brian Atwood gave his speech from 1998, Go Hoyas, I guess. Administrator Power laid out her priorities for the agency and she talked a lot about localization, listening to, working with people, where they live, where they are with trust and meeting them where they are as equals, as good development and inclusive development. Inclusive, local, listening and trust, that's all peace building. This is a peace building agenda for the entire agency. So I will shut up and take some questions, hopefully some easy ones, but that's sort of where we are right now in the headspace that I'm in at least. Okay, everybody's gonna expect me to talk about the Global Fragility Act as one of the originals working on this. Going back into the Obama administration and people forget that, that's how long we've been working on this. It calls for working differently. What will that look like and when do you know when you're succeeding or not? That's an easy one, right? I don't know what it looks like because I'm part of the problem. I've been doing this for a long time. What we wanna do is innovate. Now we have some ideas, we've learned a lot of things, we know what doesn't work and we know what some things work really well. But we need to get, we talk about it all the time. One of the phrases inside the US government that is the most used and never, actually we do it as whole of government. We always talk about breaking down the barriers and getting out of our silos and then we run right back into our silos. There's a problem in a country and we come up with a matrix. Who's gonna do what? And that matrix, it's each office or each bureau and an amount of money. And it reads like a list of bureaucratic constituencies and we take a look at a problem and we say what do we need to do and we define the solution by the tools that we have, not by the tools we need to use. And everyone squeezes in their little program. Used to work for the UN, so you've seen how this works, right? That's okay. So within a day or two, we don't have a strategy. We have a list of programs that may or may not add up and then 15 different bites at the apple, they add up even worse. So we have these disparate programs in a country that have lost the logic behind it. I would say we back up, and I've been challenged by staffers on the Hill who say, under the Global Fragility Act, please don't come up here and have something look just like it used to look. Analyze the problem and say, if we didn't have any of those things that prevent us, just what do you really think you can do if you could do anything you want? Don't worry about what type of money. Don't worry about which part of, or which constituency is calling for an X program there. The hard part is going to be getting people like me who've been working in this system that is based on one year projections, year to year to look 10 years out and then try to roll back how do we get from here to there? And that comes into the doing business differently. Breaking the glass, moving the sludge, trying to get in there, it's not gonna be easy. A friend of mine yesterday, a colleague said, I've been challenging people in my bureau to identify daily annoyances and things that cross their desk and the question, why do we need this? Why do we have to do this? Is this form necessary anymore? Is this, why are there 13 clearances on a very simple document? She pushed back on one and was questioning and immediately, bam, here comes the bureaucracy because there's someone in the building whose job it is to have that form. So that form's never going away unless someone really gets up and says, sorry, I have the power of law behind me that says we need to get rid of some of this stuff. We can't do that everywhere all at once. That's why we're gonna have priority countries so we can test it out but we're not gonna stick just to those priority countries. If the law's telling us to do things better and we find out what that looks like, why the hell would we not do that everywhere and just keep it to those five or six or seven places? Little known fun fact, it wasn't meant to be pilot country or these five. I mean, when we originally started working and talking with the Hill, we wanted it to be everywhere. But as you know, laws, there's compromises, right? Compromises were made. So yes, that is the goal. Okay, so I'm gonna go back to what I said about you being a risk taker, speaking truth to power. If that's what it's gonna take, it's gonna take people like you, how do you, I don't wanna say train people but how do you motivate people? What's the secret sauce? I don't know. We'll find out, we'll see if we do that. When I'm asked to lecture on this stuff, I talk about bureaucratic courage, which is much easier to do, I mean, to say it than to do. Yeah, I like that. When we look back on Afghanistan, two decades, when we look back on Iraq, and I talk to colleagues that are inside the government who, this is a lived experience, it wasn't that people weren't smart, it wasn't that people weren't intelligent, but certain people that were important were making decisions that a lot of other people did not think was the right decision. But people didn't stand up in the situation room and say, I don't see how that gets us to the end. It was really hard, right, 9-11, what are we gonna do? If someone had stood up two days later at Camp David when they were deciding what to do and said, this is a generational problem. You can't have a war on terror. Terror is not a, it's not a thing you can have a war on. This is gonna be trillions of dollars over two decades and it's gonna be hard. No one's gonna listen to that. People want a quick solution. People always want a solution in six months. The White House is always, I need a plan to fix Libya in six months. I can't get my kitchen redecorated in six months. How am I going to fix a country which can't be fixed? It needs to be managed. It's just opening up the aperture and being realistic with each other about what's possible. That in itself is a risk. When your boss is saying I want a plan to solve this in six months and you say it can't be done, that's a risk. Do I do it all the time? No. How do we get people to realize that? We now have, if people have not read the SEGAR, Special Inspector General Report for Afghanistan, I highly recommend it. It goes in there all throughout. You had people doing things that they knew were not going to get us to where we needed to do. We got all wrapped up into it. We need to learn those lessons. We identify lessons well. We collect lessons well. We don't learn lessons enough. That's what we have to do. I don't know if that gets to your answer. No, it does and I think that's really key. Oh, one other thing. Sorry. Top cover. I am going to take that risk if I know my boss is going to back me up if we take heat for it. A bad news story is just a bad news story unless someone fires you for it. If you don't have an environment where people are scared to make a mistake, you can make more mistakes and we're not going to learn without making mistakes and I'm not much of an investor. I don't have much money. But I do know that if you aren't willing to take a risk, you're not going to get a whole lot on, you need to take a risk. We are running this government, I think, like a business that's just looking at what's going to happen in this quarter. These small little incremental things. No, we got to go bigger than that. Think big. We have to think big. These are big problems. Actually, and you get to my next point. I think everyone's tired of hearing me say this. 30 year high in global violent conflict. We have a global violent conflict problem. Why can't we get people to focus in on prevention? I know I've told you this before. Gary Milante from SIPRI said, he wrote an article, where's our Greta? And I said, where's our Greta? We happen to find our problem. We haven't, what do you tell us we need to do? Well, first of all, some people have said this is exactly the right time to have a bureau for conflict prevention and stabilization. Others say, wow, this is a terrible time to have a bureau because I see a lot of conflicts that it's going to be hard to stop them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. First, we need to tell our story better. If you get outside of our world of development and politics and you tell people, do you think it's better to have a war and then try to mop up afterwards or to prevent it? It's pretty clear you should prevent it. For some reason, we're being held to a standard, us peace builder development types, that our diplomatic and security colleagues are not held to the standard. Prove to me that's gonna work, Lee's. I've never heard a State Department person say, I need to fly to Geneva and have a talk, a negotiation and someone said, hold on a sec, don't do that unless you can prove it's gonna work and you better tell me exactly how much it's gonna cost. Don't even talk about weapon systems. But we have the smallest program, I'm asked all the time. Well, Rob, you do this, countering violence extremism. Do we know that works? I can't prove how many terrorists were not created. But I think dialogue at a local level, I think strengthening the social compact, I think giving agency to people that don't have it is a good thing. I can't tell you on a dial exactly how many percentage points that has upped or downed the chances for conflict. Somehow we're not getting through to people. That's one. Two, it makes perfect sense to prevent things. Study shows, dollar prevention, $16 of crisis mop up afterwards. Wow, but how do we get through to the decision makers? They are locked up in the situation room where now it's different rooms focused on what they have to focus on, which is the crisis de jure. If we bureaucratically were able to separate folks and say, okay, you're preventative, you get to focus on a 10 year strategy. Again, this comes back to the act. And they try to pull us off and say, oh, sorry, I gotta work on a 10 year plan here. I gotta put someone else on your six month plan because that thing ain't gonna work. But it's okay because in six months they never go back and check. We have to lobby ourselves. We have to lobby our bosses. We have to lobby the Hill. We have to get everyone excited for what we know. We just aren't good enough at proving it. That prevention is better than dealing with the consequences afterward. Well said. And the one thing about the Global Fragility Act also is at some point Congress is gonna ask you to come up and report on it. Die into. Die into. I wanna make sure that there's all these little things in the law, some little Easter eggs that people forget about. You guys were busy and you wrote a lot of things in there. And there's jokes aside. It is a really compelling problem set. And it's gonna be exceptionally hard. And we will fail on some things. We will fail on some things, but that's okay because there is no 100% solution to anything in this business. Yes, absolutely. And on that, telling your story differently, I'm gonna put in a plug for tomorrow morning, peace con, tomorrow morning the plenary. There is going to be incredible research that's coming out from frameworks. Julia Roy in the Horizons project that talks about different framing. What works for different groups and what are we doing wrong, but more importantly, what do we do right? What time is that one? It starts at nine, I believe. So I'll make sure you have the link. Thank you. I'm gonna turn it over to Lisa. Lisa has a bunch of questions I know. Rob, when you were talking about the case for conflict prevention, you know, I think many of us who are in the field, as you very clearly said, we feel it. We think we can see it. And then when we have to explain the mechanics of it, it becomes more complicated. And when we have to make the proof of it, it becomes even that much more complicated. So if I were a skeptical staffer, a very senior staffer on the hill, sitting on billions of dollars that could be programmed and appropriated. And I said to you, I respect you. I know you've been everywhere and seen a lot. Tell me the three great examples of where you know that an integrated, coherent, whole-of-government approach and that dial made that difference. That country didn't go to war. That conflict was prevented. What would be the three you'd give us? Or at least one. Well, at least one would be what is now Northern Macedonia, but it used to be Macedonia. People forget how close that country came to being another Balkan war. That's right. The Oakwood Agreement was a small government team that got in there and worked with them and prevented another war. And no one talks about it. That's right. I was in Kosovo at the time. So you know, Precivo Valley. Precivo Valley was another Serbian war on our hands. It was the first time in my life that I had a general point at me across a table at the NSC and say, you get those projects done or we'll have war in two months. That's right. I don't think those little projects we did were the only thing, but this stuff works and things get better. Look, Bosnia is not great. In fact, things are getting worse there all the time. But a war was stopped and there's been no war for a long time now. I used to work in Sierra Leone, a little plug for working together with the military. When the US Marines came in and pulled me and all of my colleagues out of Sierra Leone in 1998, it was nice to have some civil cooperation. When I was living in Sierra Leone and Liberia was raging next to us, Liberia had been at war for how long? Look at Liberia today. Look at Sierra Leone today. Look at FATA in Pakistan. North Waziristan, South Waziristan. It used to be a throwaway line. We used to talk about it all the time. When was the last time you heard about it? Now, a lot of hard work went into working in the FATA. At the time, 10 whatever years ago, we never, that wasn't even part of the Pakistani government. The federally-administered tribal areas were a constitutionally not part of Pakistan. They are now. We never even thought that would happen. Now, am I going on vacation there? Probably not. But it's not. People aren't dying like they were. You know South Sudan. We've all had our heart broken by South Sudan so many times. But do we stop trying? There's been a lot. All of the big conflicts that have been South Sudan, in any given season, there are many more conflicts that don't happen because there's a lot of different groups in there pulling people together and talking about water rights, talking about herding, talking about all those things. You've been part of them, I think. I've been part of them. And that's what we know works. We can measure at a local level. We have lots of evidence that this conflict, in this village, pullback, in this district, pullback, in this province, Jake Shapiro, super smart guy at Princeton who works this stuff, he goes, but the further you pull out geographically, and the more time that goes by, it becomes harder and harder and harder in these very complex systems to say this had this effect. But all the time in our lives we have those things. I used to use the example of Barack Obama became President of the United States. Why? There's a lot of answers to that question. One of them is he got the most votes. Why? Well, there's a lot of answers to that question. Now, one of the things that the Obama campaign did at the time it was completely revolutionary was the use of the internet to get people invited into the conversation excited and raising money. No one can tell you how many votes that got them. But a smart person looks at it and says, that was a good thing to do. We all the time in our lives do things that we know are a good thing, but we can't measure it. I can't measure love. I can't measure trust. I'm not giving up on love. I'm not giving up on trust. A lot of these things are common sense, but people lose their common sense when they try to evaluate it and look for proof. Rob, you've said something very interesting in your first set of comments. Somewhere in there, there was an interesting. You were talking about how the current administrator of USAID, how she looks at the system and says there's cholesterol. There's sludge in there. So that same staff appropriator says, we're going to give you a gift in legislation that allows you to, as you were describing it, break the glass. What are the three things you want broken first? So some of my colleagues who understand how things really work hate it when I say this. And some of you want to understand of this because it's very inside government, inside baseball. For the priority countries that we're going to pick, give us earmark relief. If I am a mission director right now in a country in conflict, I might have 2% of my budget that's discretionary or 3%. And depending on what kind of money I have, I'm limited to doing this with it. And it's going to take me a year or two or three. Now, the reason other people in AID say don't ask for earmark relief is because the earmark stays the same globally. So if you let this country not have to have the earmark, that means more earmarks for somebody else. Well, we can fix that. Just saying, this would have been the earmark. But because it's in this country, we're going to take that out. Please, please, please, please. I don't know how my colleagues or mission directors do it. They go in. They have two to four years to try to make a difference in this country. But the budget's not up to them. The programming's not up to them. You're looking at a problem and you say the problem here is governance. But all you got is global health money, which is important work. What we need is to make the pie bigger. We can't be cannibalizing one thing at another. I don't want someone to say, and this is what they say, we can't reduce the earmark because that's global health programming that's great. I go, that's right. So give us more. Number two, give us more flexible money that has no earmarks on it, that has no ear money, that has not withstanding authority, and that, yes, I can't tell you what's going to be used for. That's what the contingency account is about. So often, there's a report that comes out of USIP. There's a report that comes out of you name the think tank. What do we need to do in this space? We need more flexible contingency funding. And everyone reads it and everyone agrees until it's time to make the budget. And they say, but this money here, what are you going to do with it? Well, it's contingency, you see? No, no, that's like that hill will never go for that. And it gets pushed out. And then 30 days later, there's some problem in some country that no one foresaw. And they said, we don't have any money. And you go, remember that money we asked for? We didn't know this would be a problem. Three, we need to change the way that we hire. We need to change the hiring types in government. We are locked into the Foreign Service and Civil Service that were designed many, many, many years ago. This is a modern world. You shouldn't have to make life decisions and change what your job is because you've decided to get married. And now you have kids. And the lifestyle you were living overseas doesn't work now. And you can't go or one of your child can't. People make really hard choices. You must go back to the field. I can't. I have a special needs child. Then you have to quit. That's not where we are right now. When we're trying to handle and we're hitting in a big way in Samantha Power, I think it's her first day. Her first day, she signed a new DEIA strategy. We're trying to make USAID look like America. We have a long way to go. We're making inroads. We need that. We can't have these overly structured civil service, foreign service, a third of our folks aren't even either of those. And they're treated as second class citizens. You've seen, when you try to field someone, one of the things we're trying to do is field the right person in the right place at the right time. The system is built almost to prevent that. That's one, two, and three, I think. That was two. No, no, flexible funding on top of no earmarks. And yeah. OK, all right. Those are good. Those are three good ones. And a way to staff and look after people that is of this century. Well, that's back to you. Well, you talked about localization. Yes. And Ambassador Power made this big announcement at Georgetown. Oh, yes. 25% of the funding will go. President Obama tried that too. I think it was about 30% for USAID Forward. What's different now? What's going to be different? And even if you can't get there, what are you doing? What will your bureau be doing differently? So there are a lot of things to like about Samantha Power. I loved when she reeled this out and she said, you know, everyone else has tried this and everyone else has failed. I think we got to 3% or 5% under Obama. But we're shooting for the fences anyway. We're going for 20%. I love that. That's a stretch goal. It's hard. My bureau already does a lot of work at the local level. OTI does almost everything through small grants under contract that is not cash going directly to a local group, but almost all of that is to small local groups. One of the resources we have in our office of CVP is the Reconciliation Fund, people to people peace programs. All of those are small programs working with local communities around the globe in about 30-something countries. So we are excited to help teach folks what you get from localization. Don Steinberg, who's heading up the effort, or one of the people heading up the effort for USID, our former deputy administrator, who the administrator of power has brought back because of his experience, and is you want to see someone who's passionate about these things. He said to me, when he was ambassador in Gola and saw the first OTI program ever in 1994, he said, the work I saw being done there was the definition of localization. So we have a proud history that now our bureau is taking up between the work that CMM did, now CVP, between what OTI has done. We have a lot of lessons to teach others, and we're happy and proud to do that. So localization, all for it. And it's the simplest. To me, the sum up localization is you don't design a program in Washington based on what we know scientifically and with our experience. And we go out and say, we have this great program for it. You pick the country, and we're going to do it. It's sector specific, and we're going to do this. Go out to the people and say, what do you need? Don't tell them. And then say, OK, what do you want? If they want a place for their kids to play, that's important to them. We devalue people by thinking our experience is more important than theirs. And we lose the humanity. And when someone says, there's a war going on here, why are you doing backpacks for kids? Because that's what the parents wanted. My kids, your kids, someone's kid needs a backpack. Why do we think kids in Libya don't need backpacks? That is it's not just about water systems and global health and vaccines. That's all important. But then you also got to get and talk to people and meet them where they are and say, what do you want? That's localization. Thank you. I know these issues are really hard, and they're very complex. And one of the things that gets brought up is this kind of international organizations versus local organizations. I want you to talk a little bit about that. Because for me, they're not mutually exclusive. We need them both. So for those of us in the business, we all know most of those international organizations cannot do good work without the local organizations. People see WFP and they think great big blue trucks based out of Rome. But in the field, it's WFP handing off to a local government, a local organization, and it's not a whole bunch of folks that fly in who carry those bags to where they need to go. What confuses and complicates things is the money. Local organizations, and I would feel the same way, say, give me the money. But in our risk-averse world, I was on a board of an NGO for a while. And I advised them, don't go for USAID money. It was a small NGO. They had their niche. They were doing stuff. I said, you're going to have to build such a big apparatus to manage those grants. You'll need more lawyers. You'll need more, all kinds of stuff. That's not the way it should be. That's our challenge. I don't want to speak for administrative power, but I think that goes right with the sludge argument. We have built a grant agreement with USAID. I don't know how thick it is, but there's a lot of language in there. Maybe it's not fun, and it's precise, technical, geeky work. But we need to go through and get rid of a lot of those things. I don't sail, but I know that once a year, you have to scrape all the stuff off the bottom of the boat because it slows the boat down. We never scrape off the bottom of the boat. So we've 60 years of stuff that's just accumulated. It's time to go in there and get to work. I hope somebody tweets out, Rob Jenkins says, scrape it. Don't tweet that. OK, we have questions from the audience. Oh, Lynn Carter. Lynn Carter, regarding the GFA, what does a 10-year plan look like in fluid context, particularly with the rise of multi-actor conflicts and external actor meddling, such as in Libya or Yemen? Lynn, it's nice. Thanks for the easy one. I'll take the easy way out. I don't know. We're learning this as we go. This is action learning. And we're having, in real time, as is like two days ago, discussions about just this. Because we're on an accelerated timeline to get back to Congress and say, here are the 10-year strategies. We have some funding that we need to spend by the end of the fiscal year. If you want to spend money by the end of the fiscal year, you have to decide, like yesterday, what you want to spend it on. But we don't have the strategy yet. So the first year, this year, is going to be a little bit messy. We're going to have to make funding decisions before we even have the strategy. So we're going to have to have something that looks like a strategy that is, if people listen to me and many don't, I would emphasize the first two or three years and where we envision ourselves being in 10 years. But this is an active conversation that is going to have a lot of people be part of it. What we're hoping is we could come up with something that's quick and dirty, doesn't sound right, but it's going to be quick and dirty for each of these countries. They can then be shared with civil society here, civil society and country, with the local government. Do you guys think we're going in the right way? Bring people into it. It's not come up with a plan and deliver it. But I think it's the spirit of the act to make something that's iterative, to make something that is inclusive. And if we think we're going to come up with a 10-year plan that has the following objectives and the following IRs, I don't even remember what the R is for indicator results, whatever, and some of the log frame for 10 years, log frames don't work for a year to me. I couldn't stand the log frame. We're going to have to embrace ambiguity and as Ambassador Isabel Coleman has said, there are going to be steps back. These countries we pick are going to be problematic in some ways. We are not going to, it's not going to go according to plan. That's why we have to do it this way. So I don't know if that gets to the answer, Lynn, but iterative, flexible, agile, creative. Next question. There are many questions along the lines of how can CBS and USAID build young indigenous and local voices into their peace building work more effectively while at the same time building DEI within USAID, moving the sludge and taking the risk you're talking about. So we're talking about complex environments. This also is a complex set. It's interrelated. I mentioned we want to build and we're taking steps to build the USAID that looks like America. In just the last year, we've made great strides. I can't take any blame for this or credit, but folks in USAID have done a lot with both foreign service and civil service to be much more diverse and inclusive, which is great. The hard part is changing out leadership folks where you have someone like Rob Jenkins sitting in the chair and someone's got to come pick me up. But we're working. These are long-term structural problems that we're going to have some tactical success before we have strategic success. That is separate but completely related to what we do in the field where if we're not doing things in an inclusive diverse way, especially with youth, we are failing. I'll go back to what I said. I don't see how you can do peace building that is not inclusive. That's what peace building is. I don't see how you can do peace building that isn't valuing diversity. And if you think in this decade, anywhere in the world, you're gonna get substantive change and you're not involving youth, you're wasting your time. It's the same argument for women, peace and security and looking at gender aspects. The days of just a bunch of men sitting around making a deal, having some treaty and we think that's gonna work, I think those are long gone. Because the evidence shows us. Evidence shows us. We have evidence. Women are involved in peace agreements. They're stronger. Okay. Oh, Chris Holshek. Chris Holshek. In an era of great power competition, how can we create more substantive links between CPS and military capabilities like civil affairs to support state aid late efforts, led efforts at conflict prevention stabilization within the SAF, GAF frameworks? Well, Chris, it's great to see you, at least to your name. So thanks for the question. I believe, so we already have great coordination and cooperation with civil affairs where we need to. All of these things come down to site specific. I would say, just like all of our programming, the relationships we build need to be exercised and strengthened at the local level, so in country. The civil affairs and other SAF folks that are in an embassy next to the aid people who are implementing those programs, that quickly becomes a symbiotic relationship if it's one of trust and when others see the value of each other. And I've seen it do amazing, great things. Let me focus more on your great power competition. I don't like calling them saying great power competition because I don't like saying that they're great. That's one. Two, we need a broader understanding and an opening of the strategic aperture of what it looks like to compete. We compete all over the globe. And many of the places where we're experiencing conflict and we're trying to do peace building work are exactly those places that we're competing. It's not all about this great power stuff and looking at a map like it's a risk board. It's about what is happening right now in coastal West Africa. What is happening in Burkina Faso? It's amazing that you saw Russian flags flying in Burkina Faso. Wow, this stuff plays out in ways we didn't think, did it? We need more people to see that interrelatedness, interconnectedness and not have a silo that says this is competition, this is where we're gonna deploy this. This is the little peace building thing over there. I would wrap up into that. It's not exactly on point, but we also have to look at these conflicts. They aren't just violent extremist organizations. They're wars. Mali is a war. So we should be talking about peace, not just going after bad guys. We need to look at how does this end? Let's open up our aperture and say, maybe we need to take a more holistic look at the competition that's happening here, but also the forces, what needs to happen to make a conflict stop? I haven't seen a peace treaty in a long time. I don't know, last time we put a new peacekeeping thing together. We've lost some of the tools that work. And I don't think, I think we've gotten rusty with justice CT focus. And that for me has a serious overlap with competition with others. You and I, actually the three of us were at a meeting here at USIP. And we learned. That's right. There has not been a new peacekeeping mission in a very long time. You came from the UN, right? Central African Republic was probably the most recent one, C-A-R, several years ago now. And look, the competition in the car we're going on right now. And then the last one, of course, was where I was in Yemen, with the data. Okay, next question. If the GFA is successful, you'll lack counterfactual evidence of what you prevented. How will you sustain interest and political will for prevention over years, decades, for situations that seem okay? Not immediate humanitarian crisis, et cetera, but are extremely fragile? That's a good question. It's a great question. I was reminded the other day that fire departments have a very hard time trying to get little amounts of money for fire prevention education. And they have very little problem getting money for big, bright, shiny fire trucks. That's a good analogy. Yeah, I borrowed it. I look forward to having that problem. I want to get to a place where we're arguing that we have made a difference, so please, please, please keep it up. It's gonna be hard. And this is not just an easy-out answer. It takes a mindset change. It takes a change of mindset. Police don't need to prove how many crimes they prevented for us to fund them. Now, the debate on funding for police here or there, I think we all agree that I want a fire department. I'm not waiting for the fire department to prove to me that they're valuable. Why can't people see that peace building is valuable? Turn on CNN right now. Watch the Secretary of State talking about what he mentioned today. There are very real problems in this world that affect people in a very real way. We need to go after these problems with every tool we have. And if we're waiting for proof that it works in all instances, and we're having to lobby folks on proof that this works, then, as I said, we have got to do a better job of telling our story. Don't turn on CNN until five. Yeah, sorry, wait until five o'clock. How can USAID protect local organizations and activists facing serious and sophisticated cyber threats that do not have the resources, knowledge, tools to address them? Great question. We are already doing it in places. So cyber protection has become a growing part of what USAID does in particular countries. And we now have my good friend, Harry Bader, when he worked in the lab, he's now changed jobs, created a mechanism that's open to all missions everywhere to help figure out what the threat is to local organizations and then to help protect against that threat. There is a very dedicated team that is focused in USAID just on this issue specifically. I've been briefed by them several times. They're super smart, so I won't go into trying to massacre the details of it. But it's working at an extremely sophisticated level. And if you are out there right now and you're a USAID local partner, or you know a USAID local partner, where this is a challenge and it's probably everywhere, please contact the mission and let them know because there are resources available and mechanisms available for that. This is something we had sessions about today and will, and I know this is an area that people are trying to grapple with technology, cybersecurity, and how it impacts peace building. Next question. Rob said the GFA countries are coming soon. Do you have a more concrete estimate of when they will be made public? What's the internal holdup? So I said earlier, I don't have a lot of money. I'd have a lot less if I took bets on the speed or dates of decision-making. So I don't know. We're hoping incredibly soon, it could be any day. We are just about to get over the finish line. So watch this space and then we get to scramble and roll out the strategy and roll out the countries and we're excited about it. But I will not give you a date or a time, I will say soon. I have bet a lot of people in the US government, a lot of people owe me lunches. I got it wrong for the last year. Several today's sessions spoke about the disproportionate effects of climate change, violence, and the pandemic on marginalized populations. How can DEI be better integrated into USG policy and practice to holistically address these challenges? Thank you. And that's exactly going back to the Global Fragility Act, which is looking at the intersection of all of these compounding things. Each one exacerbates the other and DEI needs to be part of our thinking through all of this stuff or else we've lost it. I think the attention that we're focused on internally and the pressure we are now putting ourselves in USAID that every bureau has to report out what is their plan? What are they currently doing in their plan for DEI in their programming? Not just what we're doing inside our organization, but how are we living that and how is that playing out in the program that we're doing? And again, I sound like a broken record. If we're not concentrating on peace building somewhere and we're not looking at diversity and inclusion, then we're not doing it right. We have to have that be part of it. Okay, we have time for one more question. Beasy. That's Beasy. How will, I'm sure everybody appreciates us calling them out. How will the CPS Bureau work more closely and collaboratively with the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance so that USAID pivots from being response-based to prevention-based, how do we better align humanitarian assistance with peace building? Awesome question, Beasy. Great question, and I've never been asked that ever before. Sarah Charles, the head of BHA, and Jim Barnhart, who's the head of our Resilience and Food Security Bureau, the three of us meet together every week. Part of it is trading, part of it is a listening session for each other and how we can help each other out and part of it is to get at this issue. The conundrum has always been people on either side of this, call it the nexus, call it the what humanitarian to development continuum, different names. Everyone who's on one side thinks the other person is supposed to come closer to them, and it doesn't happen. I want them to change, they want me to change. We've got to break that down, and we've got to, and whether we do want to or not, these problem sets are being less and less discreet as time goes by. It is really hard to say that's a humanitarian disaster, that's a conflict disaster, that's a resilience disaster. It's just a problem that needs to be solved. So how do we pull people together? Leave the bureaucratic baggage at the door, and like we're trying to do with the 10-year strategies, forget what we've done in the past, identify the problem, and find a solution. Like I said, tomorrow morning, I am so excited, I've said it now I think 10 times, I'm so excited for this research to talk about it that's coming out of frameworks on how we tell our story differently and what have we been doing wrong? That's so critical. So we hope we can be some help there. So. We need it. Yeah, we do. So I don't know, Elise, do you wanna, this is your beautiful house. Just to join us in thanking you, Rob. It's a privilege when we get to sit with someone who knows so much about a field, who is prepared to talk about it with depth, with enormous feeling, and help to guide us on the right path. Thank you for that, Liz. It's really a privilege for USIP to be able to join with you. I hope this partnership continues from strength to strength. Absolutely. Thank you. Good evening.